I feel there is a trend of not fully appreciating what fathers who spend less time with kids actually do. I think that's unfair, frankly. Many of them do things that contribute to the family in other ways.

What was my Dad busy doing? Focusing on his career in order to provide for his family. Doing hobbies that increased his skill set. Fixing the house to ensure we all had a nice safe place to live. Tending to the garden to keep the neighbours happy. Building ties with the community to increase our family's standing in the community and being able to call in favours in emergencies etc.

The 4 days off he had from his primary job, he worked multiple other jobs, creating multiple streams of family income.

It's so easy to view many of these things as him not tending to his family directly. That's incredibly short-sighted.

My mother appreciated very little of those things, and constantly nagged that he never did enough. She admitted many years later this was a big contributor to their divorce.

I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. Eg "I spend 1 hour doing the dishes, you have to do something, today, and of equivalent value, to show you love us". What kind of foundation for a relationship is that? What happened to the power of a family?

I think you have a point: many men work hard to provide stability for their family, and are effectively sacrificing family time to provide that. This kind of hard work feels undervalued in modern parenting discourse, which seems to put most value on time directly spent with children or on direct day-to-day tasks (dishes, cooking, etc).

An example anecdote: my friend works construction. Lots of long hours of hard labor. His wife is unhappy because he doesn't do more childcare, but left unanswered is how he could do more. He can't work fewer hours or move to a new job without a giant income hit. His wife can't earn enough to offset daycare costs. They already live on a fairly thin budget. From the outside, I can see how he'd feel unappreciated.

That said though there are definitely also men who aren't doing childcare OR working hard, and they're happy to have their wife do everything.